Sebastian Gurovich wrote:
I have a hard disk with a WinXP NTFS physical partition and wish to add
Fedora 7 to have a dual boot system
but am not sure what to do for partitioning.
Thinking of 6 partitions in total.
(1) NTFS for windows
(2) "/boot" for boot loader
(3) "/home"
(4) "/"
(5) swap
(6) /tmp
One option, AFAIK is to create at least 2 EXT3 partitions. One for the
/boot
and the other for the rest. Then
using LVM I could create logical partitions (volumes) for "/home", "/" and
"/tmp", BUT, I know the disk will have problems in the future due to age,
wear and accidental bumps etc. I am going to take backups but the question
is: am I better off first to create many different physical partitions for
the F7 installation or should I just create two physical partitions and use
LVM to create many logical volumes out of the one physical volume?
That is,
Should I create 2 physical partitions with Partition Magic, for (1) and for
(2),(3),(4),(5) and then use LVM for (2),(3),(4),(5)
You could keep it in the free software family, and use gparted {live cd}
if you dont already have a linux installed.
(1) \boot
(2) logVol00 ("/home")
(3) logVol01 ("/")
(4) logVol02 (swap)
(5) logVol03 ("/tmp")
OR
Should I FIRST create five PHYSICAL partitions with Partition Magic (both
primary and extended) and then use LVM to end up with :
(1) \boot
(2) logVol00 (/home)
(3) logVol01 (/)
(4) logVol02 (swap)
(5) logVol03 (/tmp)
If i go with the 2nd option and leave extra free space in logVol00,logVol01
and logVol03 can I later take space from "/home ", /"tmp" or swap and
redistribute it to "/" and vice-versa using LVM?
There is some catches to actually doing that - i'm dont know how to do
that without needing to back up your lvm item, delete, recreate, restore.
Maybe I can´t create 5 physical partitions and Partition Magics extended
partition scheme is like LVM´s logical partition scheme and so the end
result is similar or am I missing something here?
Re LVM: IMHO it will make life more difficult if you have disk faults->
avoid it.
I am assuming you are space constrained: make /boot say 32MB. {I've
never had it using more than about 16MB, the updates system only keeps
two kernels in the boot partition these days}.
If you have 512MB ram, swap could be 512MB as well, If you have more
RAM, you might not need as much swap.
I wouldn't bother about a /tmp partition, instead distribute the space
between / and /home. This might make / susceptible to disk full
situations, but in my experience, this hasn't stopped the machine
working, just from being able to save ! {starting an X session as root
seems to need some space on / }. Also, some apps {firefox} download the
/tmp, then move a file when finished. Instead of this being a move
within a partition having a separate /tmp means it becomes a copy/delete
{and takes much longer}.
eg: usage of / on my PC - 5.7GB, but I am storing some data within that
size (because I ran out of space elsewhere), and I have 1206 rpm
packages installed. Another machine has / usage of 4.2GB. I quite often
make vmware virtual machines with 4GB virtual disk {32MB /boot, 512MB
swap, / as the rest. They generally have 2GB free after install. I add a
separate virtual disk if I need more space for /home}. If you tried to
do an install everything, you would need quite a huge / {/usr}, but I
don't have real stats about that.
DaveT.
